Preparing for Analytics 3.0

Analytics are not a new idea. The tools have been used in business since the mid-1950s. To be sure, there has been an explosion of interest in the topic, but for the first half-century of activity, the way analytics were pursued in most organizations didn’t change that much. Let’s call the initial era Analytics 1.0. This period, which stretched 55 years from 1954 (when UPS initiated the first corporate analytics group) to about 2009, was characterized by the following attributes:

Data sources were relatively small and structured, and came from internal sources;

Data had to be stored in enterprise warehouses or marts before analysis;

The great majority of analytical activity was descriptive analytics, or reporting;

Creating analytical models was a “batch” process often requiring several months;

Quantitative analysts were segregated from business people and decisions in “back rooms”;

Very few organizations “competed on analytics”—for most, analytics were marginal to their strategy.

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